134

Always mark-up first. Regardless of what the kids are doing these days, I stick by my guns and start with mark-up first. A fun experiment (maybe not for you, but definitely for me) is to see how your site reads on Lynx. It does serve as a good gauge of whether the content on the site is structured properly or not.

Most of what I design that incorporates type has a typographic scale as its foundation, which informs the typeface choices and layout proportions. The process of creating that scale begins by asking what the type needs to do, and what role contrasting sizes will play in that.

I think Eric is absolutely right. The barrier to entry for accomplishing what you want with CSS is much lower now. It only seems more complicated if you’re used to doing things the old way.

I envy “the kids”, the ones just starting to learn front end now. They’re likely never going to know the pain of float drop, or wrestling with inline blocks, or not being able to center along one axis. They’re going to roll their eyes when we old-timers start grumbling about the old days and say, “Floats?!? Who ever thought floats would be a good way to lay out a page? That’s totally not what they’re for, anyone can see that! Were you all high as a kite, or just utterly stupid?” You know, the way “the kids” talked ten years ago, except then it was about using tables for layout.

It must be the day for documenting the history of CSS. Here’s an article by Aaron on the extraordinary success story of CSS Grid. A lot of the credit for that quite rightly goes to Rachel and Jen:

Starting with Rachel Andrew coming in and creating a ton of demos and excitement around CSS Grid with Grid by Example and starting to really champion it and show it to web developers and what it was capable of and the problems that it solves.

Then, a little bit later, Jen Simmons created something called Labs where she put a lot of demos that she created for CSS Grid up on the web and, again, continued that momentum and that wave of enthusiasm for CSS Grid with web developers in the community.

The BBC has been experimenting with some alternative layouts for some articles on mobile devices. Read on for the details, but especially for the philosophical musings towards the end—this is gold dust:

Even the subtext of Google’s marketing push around Progressive Web Apps is that mobile websites must aspire to be more like native apps. While I’m as excited about getting access to previously native-only features such as offline support and push notifications as the next web dev, I’m not sure that the mobile web should only try to imitate the kind of user interfaces that we see on native.

Do mobile websites really dream of being native apps, any more than they dreamt of being magazines?

Lin gives a deep dive into Firefox’s new CSS engine specifically, but this is also an excellent primer on how browsers handle CSS in general: parsing, styling, layout, painting, compositing, and rendering.

Oh, how I wish I could’ve been at Web Directions Code in Melbourne to see this amazing presentation by Charlotte. I can’t quite get over how many amazing knowledge bombs she managed to drop in just 20 minutes!

You can perfectly use CSS grid layout today if you don’t expect exactly the same appearance in every single browser, which isn’t possible to achieve nowadays anyway. I’m well aware that this decision isn’t always up to us developers, but I believe that our clients are willing to accept those differences if they understand the benefits (future-proof design, better accessibility and better performance). On top of that, I believe that our clients and users have — thanks to responsive design — already learned that websites don’t look the same in every device and browser.

She points to multiple ways of using CSS Grid today while still providing a decent experience for older browsers.

Crucially, there’s one message that hasn’t changed in fifteen years:

Websites do not need to look the same in every browser.

It’s crazy that there are still designers and developers who haven’t internalised this. And before anyone starts claiming that the problem is with the clients and the bosses, Rachel has plenty of advice for talking with them too.

Your job is to learn about new things, and advise your client or your boss in the best way to achieve their business goals through your use of the available technology. You can only do that if you have learned about the new things. You can then advise them which compromises are worth making.